Petri Net Based Formal Semantic Extraction from Code

Abstract

Due to the rise of reverse engineering practices from the last two decades, worth of design engineers become highlighted. Therefore, the point of concern is the verifiability of the reverse engineered architecture, because these practices are more likely to use in safety critical systems. Hence, a prototype is needed to verify or to validate the reverse engineered design or module of the legacy system to use in further applications to evade future loss. Therefore, dynamic analysis of the system is main concern which is not possible through direct reversing from the source code. It may include multiple execution trace analysis of the system. Generating a diagram, representing the design of the application, from the code helps to study the runtime behavior of the application. However, diagrams are an informal representation of the behavior which do not support verification and validation of the application. Therefore, there is a need to generate the formal representation of the application. This research focus on the automatic generation of Petri net models from code which describe the behavior of the application as well as its verification. Moreover, generating Petri net formal model from code is a challenging task which is the focus of this research. Firstly, a systematic literature review and comparison of different reverse engineering tools will be performed to critically find out the research gap. Further, this research will proceed to provide a framework to reverse engineer the formal representation of code to understand the behavior the system